all the food that's fit to print The Education Issue - Slow Food

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A co-producer is a consumer who knows and understands problems of food production: quality, economics, and processing requirements, the culinary aspect. It’s not just someone who consumes. It’s that they want to know. Producer — Carlo Petrini Driving Change in the Dining Hall — By Severine von Tscharner Fleming The snail | Spring 2008 16 Better food for bettering young minds—and much more As a student-farmer and discerning campus eater, I’ve long lobbied for sustainable institutional purchasing. And that’s how, one day, I found myself on a golf cart in southern California. My friends and I were picking up the big blue bins of food waste the dining halls had saved for us. It was the Campus Composting Program that we’d proposed, that the student senate had funded, and that we now found ourselves beneficiaries of. The compost we made from the food scraps went directly to our student-run organic farm, where it rose up in steaming piles each morning under the oak trees, giving our farm a properly banked buffer on all sides. The piles said, “Attention visitors: Agriculture practiced here!” Except for the stinky swill of cantaloupe rinds gone sour and some slight worries about the flaky white fungicide on the pineapple peelings, we relished the whole business. The day of our great triumph came when we delivered about 100 pounds of Tahitian squashes to the kitchen at Pomona College. There was great delight among the dining staff as we did a glory-lap around the kitchen with our four-foot-long mutants (the squashes, usually drum shaped, had managed to cross with some other cucurbits and were like an ogre’s boomerangs, magnificently striped dun on the outside, bright pumpkin orange on the inside). Institutional purchasing is an incredibly powerful instrument for changing the local economic framework for sustainably produced paper, lumber, food, and other needed resources. When a college decides its purchasing based on certain environmental metrics (non-toxic cleaning supplies, locally harvested lumber, family farmed foods, fair trade coffee) they are able to leverage substantial clout among their various contractors, suppliers, and local businesses. Even a small college can decide to sell only fair trade T-shirts, ensuring business to a responsible textile manufacturer, as well as setting a good example for its students. When it comes to food, the benefits of an institutional commitment to a particular set of farmers is even more compelling. Imagine, as a farmer, not having to race out to market every week or deal with the overblown egos of urban chefs, but instead producing, under contract, a diversity of vegetables, herbs, and salads for the college ten miles away. You deliver two times per week, you get your check right away—what a revelation! The students get fresh produce, the school maintains its local greenspace and agricultural economy. Meanwhile, in the kitchen, a whole new way of cooking brings these fabulous, healthy, local ingredients into the waiting bellies of harried students. Who should drive this change in our dining halls? Is it the students—who may never have been to a farmers’ market in their lives? Is it up to local farming groups, Slow Food parents, and activists to raise the standards of taste education? Is it the role of visionary college leaders to set major goals for sustainability and freshness and see to it that the produce comes from smaller farms and not just conventional organic agriculture? There will be some freshman who prefer to stick with their diet of ketchup and onion rings, but chances are there will be a few who crave those greens one morning if they are offered consistently. And we must make it available to them! We must challenge school leaders to boldly go where students cannot and make the commitment to nutrition, fresh produce, organic milk, local farmers, and quality food. Not just “organic” baby salad mix from some distant megafarm, but quality, lovingly grown food that might well require the retraining of kitchen staff, overhauling of purchasing agreements, and certainly some patience. As we surely know by now, its worth the extra effort. Activist, filmmaker, and farmer Severine von Tscharner Fleming is the founder of the Society for Agriculture and Food Ecology (www.agrariana. org) and director of the Greenhorns.
CO-Producer The Incredible, Edible, Unattainable Egg — By Gary Giberson How to get a locally sourced school lunch In 2004 my life as a chef and food service director changed in unimaginable ways. At the start of the twenty-first century in an industrial food world, procuring food for contract feeding is done with the click of a mouse. For a chef, operating a computer is akin to having classical knife skills. I had been through countless inservice computer training courses designed to better prepare the user with the newest and most efficient web-based purchasing system. None of this, however, prepared me for what would be my greatest challenge: locating, obtaining, and purchasing eggs that were organic, local, and free range. That year, the Lawrenceville School, where I am the Food Service Director, began what would prove to be a long and rewarding journey. We took The eggs that I was able to purchase through the existing system were known in the food service contract business as “liquid eggs”: picture boxed wine, and now imagine the box filled with ultra-pasteurized, homogenized, caged, medicated, enriched, whipped egg product on the daunting challenge of becoming a green and sustainable campus. My first challenge was to convince the food service contract company I was employed by to purchase from local and sustainable farms. This purchasing request was unheard of in the current school contract feeding environment. To understand this, however, I must first describe how food arrived at my kitchen. Menus and recipes were developed by corporate chefs then approved by corporate dietitians who then would submit the ingredient list for the menus to the corporate purchasing division, where the real decisions of purchasing are made. Once the items were identified and specifications determined, they were put out for bid to the large industrial food manufacturers to determine price, availability, and most importantly, large-volume purchase incentives and rebates. When this process was completed and the food bids awarded to the manufacturers, the corporate-approved ingredients were then stocked by the approved national contracted food distributor. At my school, the approved menu items list was downloaded to my purchasing system, which restricted me in selecting only the items that appeared on the approved list to be delivered by approved vendors. From my computer I would enter my purchasing needs and electronically send my order to a password-protected website two days before my scheduled delivery date. These systems controlled my ability to know who was producing the food and where it was coming from. This complexity can be rationalized when considering that because most school food budgets are limited, companies are forced to specialize in feeding students cheaply and efficiently while aiming for the greatest profit. But let’s get back to that egg. The eggs that I was able to purchase through this system were known in the food service contract business as “liquid eggs.” The product comes delivered in large, 20-pound plastic dispenser bags packaged in cardboard with a pouring spout. Envision boxed wine, and now imagine the box filled with ultra-pasteurized, homogenized, caged, medicated, enriched, whipped egg product with citric acid added to preserve freshness. For me to procure organic, local, free-range eggs from the farmer adjacent to the school’s property was way out of the box. These are just a few of many problems the food service company had with this request: the farmer was not on the approved vendor list and did not carry a large general liability insurance policy; the eggs were still in their original packaging (a shell) and, therefore, could be hard to work with and possibly contaminated; the product was not pasteurized and potentially unsafe; and the corporate purchasing division could not negotiate a price or a large-volume purchase incentive rebate with the local farmer. Continued on next page 17 The snail | spring 2008
Page 1: ISSUE SPRING 2008 all the food that
Page 5 and 6: Dear Members, I confess: I like whe
Page 7 and 8: ehavior, and their benefits in term
Page 9 and 10: ut young farmers, chefs, and other
Page 11 and 12: Teaching the Next Generation of Eat
Page 13 and 14: Candelario Vazquez grew up in a mig
Page 15 and 16: Sustainable U. Higher ed heads for
Page 17: STORYTELLING Education at Slow Food
Page 21 and 22: BOOKS SLOW READS In Defense of Food
Page 23 and 24: Continued from page 7 eat. Advocati
Page 25 and 26: Ivy Chu Antonino Ciaccio & Virginia
Page 28: SLOW FOOD USA 20 Jay Street, No. 31

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